I’m in a certain Starbucks and next to me an overweight, possibly semi-homeless African-American man is lounging in his corner with his Bible open before him on the table and is drifting in and out of a nap. He comes here every day; I know that because I do too. I come and do work on my computer and take prescription stimulants and leave my expensive sunglasses on half a second too long after walking in so that if the hot girl, who comes here a lot too and who I think is a graduate student, is here she’ll know I’m stylish. Anyway, he’s leaning back in his chair and dozing, this big black man, muttering to himself (or moaning, put more accurately) which is of interest because he’s in public and he’s not sitting with anyone. I pause my music and take out an ear bud. It’s a prayer, this thing he’s muttering, “O Lord, help me to be humble,” he says. He’s fat, not grossly so but yes, fat and probably homeless, granting a liberal meaning of the term, and has no immediately apparent career ambitions and is middle aged. He wears a knit cap and a scarf all the time which is weird because it’s June and although it’s true that they keep this establishment very cold, he has been periodically stepping out to sit at an outdoor table for spells but even then, he never removes his warm clothes. This has been his wont for the months we’ve both been coming here on a daily basis.

He keeps on praying though he’s slurring his speech now a little bit, not because he’s drunk or anything but because he’s halfway asleep. The prayers are all pretty similar, he just asks God out loud to help him be humble. His life already seems humble to me because all he does every day is sit in the same corner of this one Starbucks and read his Bible and nap and sometimes have conversations with members of the cadre of recovering alcoholics who, also semi-homeless, seem to live for months-long stretches in the rundown motel next door. They are also always here. I suspect my guy, the one who is sleep-praying, lives at the motel too, but I can’t say so with absolute certainty because I’ve never once arrived at the Starbucks before him, nor ever left after him. He’s a gregarious talker, when given the chance, and most of the staff must know him because when they leave after their shifts, he calls out a friendly goodbye from across the seating area. If they like him—and I think most of them do—it’s because of his congeniality and because he’s kind of a novelty, an eccentric I guess you could say, but in a real friendly way.

This guy’s associates—the other, aforementioned daily regulars (excluding me, that is)—do not, however, appear to be all that well liked by the staff, and I can’t help but notice that many of them don’t buy much, despite setting up shop here for hours on end every day. My interactions with them have been limited, but as a rule they are a very weird bunch. Their presence gives the place a certain ambiance which is antithetical to what I think Starbucks is going for, and the following is a short list of things that are heavily overrepresented per capita at this particular Starbucks location: mustaches, implements of assisted ambulation including walkers and wheelchairs, breathing aids including mobile oxygen tanks, visceral body fat, long hair on men, manual labor-type overalls/jumpers. Some of these folk kind of run together in the mind, but there are a few big personalities that really stand out.

There’s the guy with Coke bottle glasses and a toupee; he’s Southern and smokes reds and is friendly but I get the impression the others are a little bit put off by him. I’m not sure about the degree to which wider social norms are replicated among the itinerant and perpetually ill crowd in which he runs, so I couldn’t really say why, but I have a feeling that this group here at Starbucks is tolerating him, but only just. He once cornered me outside and initiated a polite conversation in which he mentioned his sister had recently thrown a graduation party for his niece at their lake house in upstate New York, but I thought he was lying about it, as I still do to this day.

There’s also the horrifically fat woman. Well, she’s not a full member of the semi-homeless motel crew I guess, because I see her drive here in her 1980s Chevrolet sedan, which is full of trash bags by the way, filled with what are presumably the sum of her earthly possessions. She, though, gets along famously with the group at large, far better than does the man in Coke bottle glasses and a toupee, so I think there’s some back story there, or maybe it’s just that the true hardcore motel element recognize in her a kindred spirit even if she doesn’t actually stay at the motel. When she comes in, she makes a beeline for the big leather chairs and plops down. Sitting draws up the hems of her pant legs, exposing massive, lymphedema-smitten ankles of cracking flesh. She mostly naps too, and comfortably because her chin and jaw sink into the pillow of flesh she totes around her neck. Once I was working on my laptop in one of those leather chairs when she plopped down in the chair beside me. And though I was visibly busy and even had my earbuds in, she just started in on me, asking me about my job, and how her daughter’s a teacher too, and how she has all these medical bills but no way to pay them. I really did have a lot of work, so after fifteen or twenty minutes of her ignoring my non-verbal cues that this was business time, I left. I’ve seen her do much the same thing to others in the intervening months since it happened to me. Now I always sit at a small table against the wall, near my guy’s corner spot, and avoid the leather chairs.

My guy is still praying and sleeping and it’s somewhat similar to how a dog will nap on the floor by your feet and whimper and stir because in his dreams, he’s chasing rabbits, as my grandfather would say. The words are more or less indistinguishable now but there’s a yearning and earnestness to his tone, even in his shallow sleep. There are two people next to me on my left, a man and a woman, but I’ve never seen them before and they are not in poor physical shape nor do they appear homeless, semi or otherwise. I would guess that they are Ethiopian or Eritrean. These two keep looking over at my guy praying himself between sleep and consciousness and they are staring and speaking in their mother tongue, probably about how he’s weird. It does sound disturbing, the moaning, like I said, but to me this pair seems rude, like they are being kind of brazen about how much they think he’s weird. Also, the woman has been looking over at my screen periodically since she sat down, and I hate when people try to see what I’m reading or doing on my computer. I get pretty mad, disproportionately so probably, so I clench my teeth and smile with apparent but vacant warmth at her like I just happened to be scanning the room and so she finally looks away and talks again to the guy across from her and I wonder all of a sudden if they like Starbucks coffee? It just occurred to me a lot of their coffee beans are Ethiopian, fair trade sourced.

My guy stirs and rouses himself but thankfully not because the Ethiopians were being mean. He almost certainly didn’t notice that because he was dozing and anyway it was subtle enough, although on the other hand I myself was quite attuned to it, though I had the advantage of full consciousness. In my experience over the months my guy only gets up for one of three possible reasons and those are: 1) to go to the bathroom but honestly that doesn’t happen too often with him, why? I don’t know, but I’ve definitely noticed that it is, relative to his liquid consumption, a pretty rare occurrence; 2) to order a venti Frappuccino with whipped cream, which he never can remember the name of so when he gets to the counter he describes, as he calls it, a “coffee milkshake,” but the baristas know exactly what he means; or 3) to help this little old lady cross the road. I know how that sounds but it’s true. I struggle with feelings of utter scorn for the lady in question. She is the most wrinkled thing I’ve ever seen and small like a bird and she looks around at the world through hateful eyes, and I find that I take that part really personally. She also, I think, lives in the rundown motel so she’s part of the gang, maybe even a founding member, given her advanced age, but she doesn’t seem to have elder stateswoman status among them or anything like that, because all she does when she’s here is sit by herself and scowl.

As it happens, Option 3 is in fact the reason my guy is getting up. He begins to assist the old woman who has just begun to stir in her own seat and wants to get up, a process which has sometimes stretched to taking upwards of one minute, even with his help. My guy, the sleep-pray’er, helps this shriveled lady across the street several times a day because she can’t make up her mind about where to hang out and because she is so weak it takes her ten minutes to cross forty feet of pavement to the motel. That’s not an exaggeration; her pace boggles the mind. You couldn’t go that slow if you tried. She regularly causes congestion at the entrance to the Starbucks because once she’s within eight or so feet of the door it’s very hard to zip around her without feeling extremely rude, although I’ll admit there is a certain comic element to watching the whole scene unfold as people try to judge if they can do it or not without putting themselves to shame. One time I went outside to get some fresh air and caught her resting with her hand on the hood of my car. That displeased me but I reminded myself that compassion needs to trump my Anglo-Saxon sense of respect for personal property. She wasn’t resting anyway, that’s just how slow she moves, so slow that she appears to an outsider to be resting and leaning on a car when really she is, by her standards, in dynamic motion and leaning on a car.

My guy has been gone for a few minutes now but I can see him through the venetian blinds with this little old lady leaning on his arm the whole time. They’re getting close to the sidewalk, though he’s not home free yet because the curb still looms, and just beyond that an array of motel doors, one of which opens on the old lady’s room. It’s a freak show, that motel. Those people are the absolute weirdest. You have the Starbucks crowd and they are a distinct group, but some of the semi-homeless motel guests are of a rougher sort, and I wonder if perhaps the Starbucks faction aren’t the relative gentlemen of their environment. Just an hour earlier two pudgy and shirtless thirty-year-old men almost came to blows with this other very fat woman, because they’d been throwing a frisbee in the parking lot which kept banging against her motel room window on errant throws. I thought I was going to be called upon to intervene, because the men weren’t being apologetic at all and the verbal confrontation seemed to be hurtling toward violent resolution before, somehow, a détente was effected.  

Anyway, my guy comes back and he sits down next to me and before you know it, he’s mumbling again with his eyes closed. I shouldn’t talk so much about the mumbling as usually he’s pretty quiet and I don’t hear him do it that often, and by my harping on it I make him sound way crazier than he is. But yes, he does settle in pretty good and sleep-prays some more. His voice sounds like a child’s, helpless and maybe even upset, but not afraid. And I want to harm myself or at least to cry. The Ethiopians next to me are laughing a lot now, not at him though, they are just happy and I think in love, but suddenly that all seems very inappropriate. “Lord make me humble,” I hear him pray.